Agile project management with XP Manual

MANUAL GESTIÓN DE PROYECTOS ÁGILES

All code belongs to everyone

One of the secrets of a successful project is that the team is united in achieving the project's objectives. When the team is a group of developers who have to produce a software product, this means that all the code belongs to everyone, regardless of who wrote each line. In other words, there is no ownership of the code. To achieve this, code reviews are usually done from one developer to another, and developers are involved in various parts of the code throughout the project. This allows all code to be considered as owned by all developers. This also encourages collaboration between team members, with the more technically skilled team members teaching the novice team members the best techniques. At the end of the day, all developers should feel comfortable with all the code, as if they wrote it themselves.

Simple design and quality code

The code should have a simple design, which is sufficient for the functionality being provided up to that point. Oversized and ultra-flexible code is discouraged, as this can make it more complex than necessary, which ultimately makes it difficult to create and maintain. In addition, it must meet quality criteria, among others: no repetitive code, simple, easy to understand once written, behaves as expected, etc. In order to achieve code quality, a technique called "refactoring" is continuously applied, which consists of actually making changes to the code in order to improve its quality, but without adding any additional functionality. In addition, continuous analysis techniques are used to measure the quality of the code. One of the most basic and widely used metrics is the one that determines if there is duplicate code.

Pair programming

Programming is a complex task that requires significant intellectual effort. When a programmer starts developing a program, his goal is that the program should behave as he wants it to and that it should do so while taking advantage of the available hardware resources. In addition, he also wants the code to be understandable so that he (or another developer) can extend or improve that code in the future. Obviously, the program has to be free of defects. But achieving a code that meets all these characteristics is not easy. It has been empirically proven that if two developers program the same code on the same PC, the result is a much higher quality code, with fewer defects and much more understandable. There are occasions where the code is quite simple, and pair programming does not add much value and could be considered as European Open Business School

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